The Linz Tattoo Read Online Free PDF

family, who had. . .
    “What is her name, this girl?”
    “Esther. . . Rosensaft, I think. Esther
Rosensaft”
    “You think ?”
    “That was her name. Esther Rosensaft. He
called her ‘Saftag,’ though she was a little stick of a thing. It
was his joke.”
    “I will strip the flesh from your bones,
Sergeant—a piece at a time if you lie to me.” Christiansen showed
his strong white teeth in a fierce grin, although he never moved
from the steamer trunk. “Nothing in the world will be as hard as
your death if you don’t tell me everything you know. Believe me,
Sergeant, I would enjoy making you die by inches.”
    “There is nothing else!” Becker gasped and
sweated and told the truth. He was just a little man after all—he
wouldn’t have had the courage to lie in the extremity of his
life.
    “I’ve told you everything. God, don’t do it
to me—please let me down. I’m no one. I never killed anyone.”
    “You were there. You let it happen without a
word. You helped your colonel—you’re helping him still. Don’t plead
your innocence to me.” Christiansen stood up slowly, giving the
impression that his legs had grown stiff from disuse. “But I won’t
make it too bad for you—I won’t leave you here to linger in agony.
I’ll merely carry out the sentence of the court.”
    When Becker saw what was coming, his chest
heaved wildly and his neck seemed to swell as he rocked his head
back and forth. He tried to speak, but at first only a strange
gurgling sound came out.
    “No!” he screamed—the tiny basement vibrated
with the word. “No! You can’t—I thought you were from Hagemann!
Hagemann was going to—”
    But the words stopped with a jerk as Becker
kicked his legs in the empty air. His back arched and the catgut
ground against the sewer pipe as he trembled and twitched and tried
to open his mouth wide enough to let in a breath.
    Christiansen had pulled the chair from under
him.
    2
    Vienna, Austria: February 24, 1948
    Esther woke up with a start, followed at
once, even before the first surprise had worn off, by a wormy
feeling of anxiety. It was happening more and more, almost every
night now. She had been dreaming about the guard.
    The wooden bunks in Cell Block West were four
tiers high and as narrow as coffins. A prisoner lying in her bed
could hardly see two meters in any direction—one closed one’s eyes
and the thought came of its own bidding: this is what it will be
like in the grave.
    The prison lights were never turned out, and
the windows were too small and too high up to make a difference. So
inside it was always the same murky gray, in which even the
guards—even the guard who haunted her, who was sometimes one man
and sometimes another, who was real even when she was awake—even
the guards hardly seemed to cast a shadow.
    It was like being dead. They were shadows
themselves.
    She had been inside only four months, and
already Esther was quite sure she would go mad if she had to stay
locked up here much longer. There wasn’t even the fear of death to
remind one that there might be some value in living. There was only
poor food and cold and not enough sleep—never enough sleep—and the
terrible grayness of everything. It was worse than the ghetto at
Lodz, where she had still had her family, or even the camps. In the
camps she had been alternately pampered and terrorized. Everything
a human being can lose, she had lost there—parents, innocence,
belief in God, the right to think of herself as a human being.
Everything except life and the will to keep it. But now she was at
the end of her strength. She was no longer afraid of death. That
was what made this place so terrible.
    For two years and eight months, she had been
free. She couldn’t face going back behind locked doors—not now, not
after relearning that there was such a thing as freedom. She had
been eleven when they walled up the ghetto, and then it had been
five years of scratching out enough to stay alive and trying